From beloved bestselling author Elizabeth Berg, comes a wonderful new novel about women and men reconnecting with one another—and themselves—at their fortieth high school reunion.
To each of the men and women in The Last Time I Saw You, this reunion means something different—a last opportunity to say something long left unsaid, an escape from the bleaker realities of everyday life, a means to save a marriage on the rocks, or an opportunity to bond with a slightly estranged daughter, if only over what her mother should wear.
As the onetime classmates meet up over the course of a weekend, they discover things that will irrevocably affect the rest of their lives. For newly divorced Dorothy Shauman, the reunion brings with it the possibility of finally attracting the attention of the class heartthrob, Pete Decker. For the ever self-reliant, ever left-out Mary Alice Mayhew, it’s a chance to reexamine a painful past. For Lester Heseenpfeffer, a veterinarian and widower, it is the hope of talking shop with a fellow vet—or at least that’s what he tells himself. For Candy Armstrong, the class beauty, it’s the hope of finding friendship before it is too late.
As Dorothy, Mary Alice, Lester, Candy, and the other classmates converge for the reunion dinner, four decades melt away: Desires and personalities from their youth reemerge, and new discoveries are made. For so much has happened to them all. And so much can still happen.
In this beautiful novel, Elizabeth Berg deftly weaves together stories of roads taken and not taken, choices made and opportunities missed, and the possibilities of second chances.
Here's what she says about her inspiration for the book:
Every time an ad for "Find Your Classmates!" comes on my computer, it makes me tempted to do just that. I often wonder about certain people I went to school with, and I still have a lot of memories from those years: some positive, some not. Some REALLY not. I wanted to explore what it is that inspires people to visit their past in this way. I wanted to look at why so many people's memories of high school are so compelling, still so freshly felt. I wanted to "go" to a reunion not my own, with characters I made up. I wanted to have FUN writing something, and I did have a really good time writing this book. One character in particular, Dorothy, was especially fun to write. She's pretty clueless, at least at the beginning, but I couldn't help but like her.Are you an Elizabeth Berg fan?
